dependency champion?

[Gordon Messmer]

Beartooth wrote:
> 	Pango should never have required libthai in the first place -- 
> not in a release -- not if libthai is anything remotely like what its 
> name suggests.

The alternatives are to a) write their own code for Thai font handling 
b) include libthai rather than link to it c) don't handle rendering Thai 
text.  Either of the first two would do nothing to make the system any 
smaller, they'd just hide from you that Thai support was developed by 
someone outside the core Pango group.

As far as I know, they wrote their own code for all of the other scripts 
that are supported, and were able to use libthai because it was already 
available.

> 	Surely not. We have developers all over the world, who must 
> think, and often write (first drafts at least), in a vast number of 
> languages. Should we jam some latter-day Tower of Babel into Fedora? 

Yes, that's generally the idea.  The system software should support the 
languages of a global user base.  As a compromise, the fonts and locale 
information which constitute the largest use of storage are optional.

> 	Are we to throw away the huge benefit that fell into our laps 
> when the Internet developed a lingua franca from its outset? 

I think you're confusing the purpose of libthai/pango (font rendering) 
with the purpose of UTF-8 (character encoding).  Thai language support 
uses UTF-8 in Fedora, too.